Alpha-Cure has spent over 22 years developing expertise in UV lamp manufacturing, and we’re proud to say that we use only the highest quality materials to produce our market-leading products. Every single one of our medium-pressure UV lamps are individually hand-made by our skilled staff to ensure a final product that our customers can rely on and UV system manufacturers can trust to deliver in their equipment.

At Alpha-Cure we use:

The highest-grade vacuum-baked quartz

Ultra-high purity noble gases

Mercury purity reaching levels of 99.995%

Aviation grade lead terminations

Here’s some more information about the materials used to create our lamps and the properties they have been chosen for:

High-grade fused quartz

Alpha-Cure uses the highest-grade purity quartz available on the market. Fused quartz has a high thermal stability and melting point (1665°C – glass melts at 600°C). The UV transmission of quartz is excellent, providing up to 95% UV transparency. The thickness of the quartz has been carefully chosen – ideally it must be thick to ensure maximum UV transmission, but it must also be sufficiently thick for thermal stability and to prevent the lamp body bowing.

Tungsten electrodes

Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal and this coupled with its excellent thermal conductivity and stability makes it ideal for use in electrodes. The tungsten electrodes are connected to the molybdenum foil seals with platinum.

Molybdenum foil seals

Molybdenum is used in the seals of our lamps as it has a very similar coefficient of thermal expansion to the quartz we used – this means that both materials will fluctuate in size the same amount as they heat and cool, preventing cracking of the seal. It is also a good electrical conductor and has high resistance to corrosion.

Ceramic cap and cement

Ceramic has high dielectric strength, meaning that it can withstand a relatively high voltage before ‘dielectric breakdown’ occurs. Dielectric breakdown means that that current flows through an electrical insulator when the voltage applied across it exceeds the breakdown voltage.